The National Security Agency’s response to the public revelations that tech firms are collaborating on PRISM and other legally dubious spying programs is simple – give the companies legal immunity. This was done for the companies that were caught working with the NSA to spy on Americans under the Bush Administration, so why not now?

Even as he defends controversial government surveillance programs, the head of the National Security Agency is asking Congress for another authority sure to inflame critics — legal immunity for companies that help the feds fight cyberattackers.

Gen. Keith Alexander has petitioned Capitol Hill for months to give Internet service providers and other firms new cover from lawsuits when they rely on government data to thwart emerging cyberthreats.

Of course if the programs are legal why do the participating companies need legal immunity?

Companies, for their part, want to be shielded from as many lawsuits as possible, especially if they’re on the front lines. And the government, in the past, has granted such immunity in the realm of surveillance — like when Congress during the Bush era shielded telecoms from lawsuits as they assisted the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program…

Alexander has been asking members of Congress for some time to adopt bill language on countermeasures that’s “as ill-defined as possible” — with the goal of giving the Pentagon great flexibility in taking action alongside Internet providers. Telecom companies, the former aide said, also have been asking Alexander for those very legal protections.

If the NSA gets its wish then what little remains of restraint on the tech firms handing over your personal information to the government will be obliterated. It will be the end of the Fourth Amendment in the ever-expanding digital realm of life. The NSA gets a blank check to snatch your information with your social media, email, and internet service providers merely being disinterested conduits free from fear of lawsuits or a customer backlash. What a country.

52 Responses
to “NSA Seeks Immunity For Tech Firms That Collaborate”

It is called, “Protect the Slave owners,” which is exactly what congress did! As with those that owned people as property unjust law was utilized to deny protection of law to a specific group of people, used for “energy” instead of energy being applied by slave to advance a slave’s self interest. Congress protected this dysfunction, until it was outlawed by Constitutional Amendment. Piss on that “Bill of Rights,” then call it protection? Sure! Piss on the NSA!

Now for the NSA to seek “retroactive immunity” for tech firms which enabled spying on Americans with or without warrant, (FISA as amended is a joke) under the color of law reminds me of the same attempts to deny slave protection of law.

If the NSA gets its wish then what little remains of restraint on the tech firms handing over your personal information to the government will be obliterated. It will be the end of the Fourth Amendment in the ever-expanding digital realm of life. The NSA gets a blank check to snatch your information with your social media, email, and internet service providers merely being disinterested conduits free from fear of lawsuits or a customer backlash. What a country.

It is called “corporate fascism.” America don’t be silent like the good Germans. We are Americans, correct, or have we abdicated reason along with rights, never intended to be compromised?

Well when you question the judgement of the Administration it only helps the Republicans. Obama has gotta keep his powder dry for next year. Do you really want someone like Ran Paul for president? We’ve got to work within the system. But without criticizing it or disturbing it in any way.

The NSA could be successful in getting this immunity, but in the process it will only damage the reputation and perhaps profitability of its so-called “industry partners.”

Tell me, what tech company wants to be know as a partner to the NSA? Note how many hostile comments were directed at Dennis Drummond yesterday on Guardian. I haven’t used a google product since this revelation and immediately switched to duckduckgo.com as my preferred search engine. At least, Yahoo put up a fight and apparently Twitter just said no. Drummond answered a few questions, then hightailed it outta there.

People don’t want to think of their internet as a stalking ground or some battlefield.

Question for anybody: if you use a vpn that is foreign based, does that mean the NSA can read your emails because you appear to be in a foreign country?

Well maybe once \”America\” finds out how the Patriot Act and FISA has been interpreted in secret by the NSA and corporations, enabled by the lax standards of a secret \”FISA Court\” and its review process, while essentially cutting congress out of the loop, those \”un-somarized\” human beings who warned from the get go that fascism was a knocking on America\’s door, should not suffer like the Good Germans who said nothing.

At some point, the Nuremberg defense, it all legal and I\’m just following orders, is like a bucket of leaking water because it is full of holes, predicated on fear?

Maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe Americans are the new “Silent Germans,” somarized, drug dependent and absent a sense of history because so many have been brainwashed into non thinking “rats” in a corporate fascist’s controlled mouse trap maze, all based in fear! No wonder why so many people die young. Being addicted is easy. Sobriety requires that one actually deals with fear. Fear of being “sober” and thinking clearly? America is addicted to “fear,” and like any addict addicted, they get played.

This is another indication of the veneer of the Corporate State being sheared away. There is no difference between the board rooms of major corporations and conference rooms at the Capital. The Social Contract is null and void, the Bill of Rights is passé. Even after this is passed, Obamanation will still insist that those who tell you about the “legal” doings of the Corporate State are traitors and felons.

Big Government and Big Business working together, how novel. It’s almost as if there is a revolving door of elites going between government and the corporate sectors snaking money and power off the scheme. Or something.

One would think that a motivated AG would want to round up all the bad guys if for no other reason than to make a name for himself. I would. I suppose the 1% have a stranglehold on all sectors of the federal government so as to make that unlikely.

If one did a venn diagram of the major shareholders of tech, energy, banking/fraud, and MIC companies how many of the .1% would be in the intersecting group? We live in a plutocracy world and technology makes it possible to control every major Country’s government.

spanishinquisition @ 28
“One would think that a motivated AG would want to round up all the bad guys if for no other reason than to make a name for himself”

Yes, one would think that. But the AG doesn’t want to offend his employers on the other side of the revolving door. Ethics would also get in the way of everybody up and down the chain of command. Ay, what a system!

thanks again, DSW, for another fine cronical of the corporatist state gov’t and its minions.

i have a request: when referring to “corps,” please use that term. true companies are owned and operated by their human owners and succeed or fail on the human owners’ decision making. just because General Motors Corporation, Inc. changed its name to “General Motors Company, Inc.” does not make it a company. a good rule to follow is whether the human(s) at the top of the decision making process have 51% of the risks/rewards for their decisions; otherwise, they’re just hired “managers” of a corp.

i know this is just another quaint word definition from the 20th century, but it is a good reminder of how effective the rovian pr machine’s announcement of “changing reality and changing it again” has come to pass.

the hijacking of the meaning (associated image) of words has pretty much perverted and derailed meaningful conversations –as intended.

OMG that would be so faptastic! Last time didn’t he say that honestly we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens? Or did he say that every other time too?

Right as usual. He doesn’t want to piss off the private sector as that is his future after he has stolen all the taxpayer money he can get away with. When you think of it. THAT is exactly what is wrong with our country now. 1) Get elected to govt office 2) Accept bribes and steal as much money as you can for yourself and funnel money to all your family & friends, 3) Leave govt and cash in on the private sector with all the connections you made as a govt employee.

I’m afraid they may find out that encouraging the populace to be ignorant, beat down, and desensitized to violence could work out to their peril.

Perhaps someone should ask Alexandar how immunity worked out after the chinese, french revolutions? I don’t know of any long term successful totalitarian states. They always swing to extremes. Its really only a question of who’s left when the peasants take over. After all, the 1% have no power the 99% don’t give them. Not a drop.

Send kids over seas to get them used to killing. OK I get that. That could be smart, but then to expect the same kids to come back and suppress their starving families.. I don’t think the Obama’s, the Kock’s, or anyone in DC has thought about the end game. FDR was allowed, he didn’t show up kicking and screaming just for the common man. He was rich and didn’t want to be the first against the wall..

I’m hopeful there will be peaceful solutions to our problems, but I look at my neighbors and wonder if the PTB have really thought this through..

All kidding aside, I think you are 100% correct. A “conspiracy nut” friend of mine, let’s call him Danny because that’s his name, showed me a book in the late ’70′s that predicted an international banking conspiracy and all this exactly as it has occurred. I, of course, told him he was crazy for believing that and the book was a bunch of hooey. That nobody could pull that off on a national basis much less globally. (Remember he is a conspiracy nut)

WEll, Danny lives in a “compound” in a little town NW of Houston with enough firepower to keep a small army pinned down for at least 8-10 days and enough food, supplies and ammunition for about 60-80 days.

I never thought we’d come to this in the US of A. Banks/corporations running the country. Government for sale to the highest bidder and beholden to the 1% at the expense of the 99%. Big brother spying on us in the air on the ground and in the bedroom. And the government squashing public demonstrations worse even than in the 60′s
. And every day it seems to get even worse.

Wrong! Jefferson and Madison, both certainly did. Hence a desire to regulate “corporations,” and the “undue influence of money” in the original “bill of rights.” Seems this SJC like Taney’s which sided with the slave owners is protecting a “corporate interest,” to economically leverage America into servitude to monopolies, as a slave was in servitude to his master? Slavery!

Same old fucking shit….. Guess America is just to strung out to grasp the reality of the situation?

So it IS a continuing effort to pick up the pieces, that social movements are necessary to build and rebuild, as required, over and over, a human, humane, and just civil society.

Hedges words are uplifting and necessary. And from such words may grow understanding that go on to develop the agreed upon foundational principles which a sustainable civil society must have, beyond lip-service and cynical manipulation into myths of cultural superiority and “manifest destiny”, in order that the people of that society survive and thrive.

My question kind of goes, however, to the practical concerns of what we will have to work with, in terms of the necessities … say food and shelter, the simple, basic requirements for human existence and survival when a supposedly civil society is deliberately collapsed to the direct benefit of very few.

We now have a “government” which is making war on practically everyone … including the citizens, “the people”, whose “informed consent” is the ONLY justification for AND legitimacy of that government …

The NSA ordered the companies to do illegal things. The companies did the illegal things so they need immunity otherwise they will rat out the NSA. In recent years immunity has been granted to provide a legal cover up for government actions. Also when similar government actions are revelled Congress will vote to change the law to protect the lawbreakers.

You guys have it all wrong, you need to frame it in terms of a patronizing petulant child metaphor: we expected a pony but now that we didn’t get one we will take our balls and go home, if only Obama had a magic lectern that made the republicans do his bidding. Etc.

Capuano is as liberal as Conyers and almost as liberal as Kucinich, yet there they were, co-plaintiffs with Paul and some Republicans against fellow Democrat Obama.

Sadly, the lawsuit was thrown out of federal court. Incredibly, the court held that ten members of Congress have no standing to sue when the President ignores the War Powers clause of the Constitution and decides about Libya without consulting Congress.

There is only one version of the Bill of Rights and Madison and Jefferson never offered it. The colonies/states refused to ratify the Constitution unless the Bill of Rights was added as soon after ratification as reasonably possible. It was added to the Constitution and ratified within a matter of months.

And Jefferson never made that comment about corporations and/or banks that people incorrectly attribute to him, either.

Former Democratic Senator Bradley wrote a book a few years ago, noting that Democrats are always looking for a Messiah at the top of the ticket while Republicans focus on bottom up organization.

I am not saying he is correct, I am just saying that is what he wrote.

Anyway, it seems to me that both major political parties nowadays seem to be searching for that Messiah at the top of the ticket, maybe the Republicans even more than the Democrats. The 2011-12 Republican primaries seems to evidence downright desperation in that regard.

But, I agree with you. As far as national security, no Messiah will be forthcoming from either of the major political parties. I would add the plutonomy as well. No Republican or Democratic savior on that, either.

Democrats who are to the left of Obama seem to be banking (no pun intended) on Elizabeth Warren (assuming anyone allows her to be the nominee).

Me, I’m reserving judgment until I see more. I rushed to judgment with Obama in 2007 and won’t do that again. Indeed, I am not sure I can bring myself to vote Democratic again, apparent savior or not.